1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine

The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine is presented as the choice that crystallizes the novel’s conflict between Jewish statehood and Shaltiel Abravanel’s proposal for a shared Jewish-Arab political future. Abravanel opposes both partition and independence, believing that a state founded without agreement with the Arabs will deepen fear and lead to prolonged war; his position isolates him from the Zionist leadership and is later remembered alongside the loss of his only son.

Political setting and opposition

In 1948, as the British Mandate was ending, Abravanel tried to persuade David Ben-Gurion that Jews and Arabs might agree to a condominium if the Zionist movement gave up the idea of a Jewish state. For this position he was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the Jewish Agency leadership, which Wald describes as the unofficial Jewish government at the end of the Mandate. The plan’s associated political choice is therefore more than a proposed territorial arrangement in the novel: it marks the divide between a state built through national sovereignty and Abravanel’s insistence on reaching a political agreement with the Arab population.

Abravanel’s opposition had developed over years. He had once believed that Jews could build a home in the Land of Israel without displacing anyone or committing injustice. By the 1920s he had begun to doubt that belief; in the 1930s he concluded that the two peoples were moving toward collision and a bloody war in which only one could remain. He continued to support the Jewish aspiration for a home, but came to believe that it must be shared with the Arabs. His dissent in the 1940s thus arose not from rejection of Jewish presence, but from his conviction that statehood and partition would make coexistence less attainable.

Abravanel’s alternative and its rationale

Abravanel argued for replacing the departing British Mandate with an international mandate or a provisional government under American supervision. He proposed allowing a single wave of about one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors to immigrate, bringing the Jewish population in the country from roughly 650,000 to 750,000, and then pausing further demands for a Hebrew state while the Arab population gradually adjusted to the Jewish presence. He believed Arab opposition was driven especially by fear of Jewish power, educational and technological advantages, and ambitions to expand and control the territory—not simply by the existing Zionist communities themselves. In his account, the small Zionist presence contained the feared potential of a much larger power.

His warnings about partition were stark. If Jews declared an independent state after the Mandate, he predicted a bloody war with the Arab world, perhaps also with the Muslim world. Even if the Jews won several rounds of fighting, he expected the conflict to last generations: each victory would intensify Arab fear of Jewish power and expansion. These are Abravanel’s forecasts as reported by Gershom Wald, not outcomes established by the cited passages. Their importance lies in how the novel places them beside the arguments of those who regarded armed struggle and statehood as necessary for survival.

Rejection and aftermath

Abravanel voiced opposition to the United Nations partition plan and Israeli independence in 1947. His colleagues called him a traitor and believed he had lost his reason; he was given two hours to choose between resignation and expulsion, and resigned. He then fell silent in public, convinced that he had no interlocutor. In the face of the approaching war, Wald recalls, people believed the conflict would be a struggle for life or death and that defeat would mean none of them survived. That perception helps explain why Abravanel’s proposal found so little hearing, without resolving the novel’s question of whether another course was possible.

Wald, who had once sided with Ben-Gurion’s hard realism rather than Abravanel’s ideas, later describes the limits of force: military power can prevent destruction for a time, but cannot turn an enemy into an ally, a fanatic into a tolerant person, or a person seeking vengeance into a friend. Shmuel likewise challenges the assumption that Arabs should welcome newcomers who took their land, fields, villages, cities, ancestral graves, and their children’s inheritance. Together, these reflections frame the plan’s political stakes in terms of both security and dispossession: preventing immediate defeat is not the same as creating consent or ending hostility.

Significance in the novel

The plan’s significance is sharpened by its domestic and spatial setting. The house at the end of Rabbi Elbaz Alley stands at the edge of Jerusalem, near rocky fields and the remains of Sheikh Badr; elsewhere, Shmuel encounters the barbed-wire boundary, minefields, and warnings marking the divide between Israeli- and Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. These boundaries give physical form to a political world in which movement and contact are constrained. Within the house, too, rooms are carefully divided, and Shmuel’s work and access are restricted. The novel does not equate these boundaries with the partition proposal, but places political separation beside the everyday experience of walls, limits, and forbidden passage.

Abravanel’s opposition is consequently neither a simple endorsement of an alternative plan nor a voice the novel presents as able to avert catastrophe. His proposals are linked to an effort to imagine shared life, while the remembered war and his son Mija’s death expose the human cost against which that hope is judged. The partition plan becomes the focus of an unresolved conflict: the demand for security through national statehood confronts the warning that sovereignty and military victory cannot, by themselves, make former enemies into partners.